Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Basement water damage, waterproofing

Whole weekend, too, sound like. Sorry to hear it, man.

Do you have any idea as to whether the sump pump kept up with the drainage? I have two electric sump pumps in my house (one to kick in if/when the other fails or fails to keep up. It's in it's separate sump hole). I also plan on putting in a battery backup sump pump in case the power goes out. This thread just gave me some incentive to actually get it done. Glad you didn't have any speaker damage.

Yeah, the sump pump works; the water just seeped in a different direction.

Just got word that my wife had to dismantle my audio/video cabinet and move the components because now that carpet's wet, too.

That'll be fun to reassemble. *writes off weekend

HomieDad, this emphasizes the need for us to meet for beer one day.

I've never seen Anaheim's version of Disney, so I'm thinking that'll be the way to do it, if Tuttlefest doesn't get us together first.

I wholeheartedly agree.

An FYI on that. A friend of mine recently built a new home and his backup sump-pump can be water-driven. It hooks up to the water line. If the pump wants to run and the power is out, it uses the house tap water pressure to drive the pump. The tap water is simply expelled with the rest. Even with an extended power loss his basement won't flood.

I thought that was a pretty cool idea. Maybe something to look into?

The same thing happened to our basement. Our problem was that our old main sewage line was blocked up. Since it was an old clay pipe and they couldn't get it routed...we had to have a 10 foot deep hole dug in our front lawn to install a PVC access point to route it out.

If you've had runny toilets in the basement or they are not flushing the best that they could, you may have a drainage problem.

Essentially...we had a lot of rain...at first we thought it was the sump pump because one of our two died. So we had to replace the one WHILE water was rising in the sump pit about 1 inch every 2 minutes...that was exciting while I was the one to empty it out with a bucket while my dad was buying a sump pump.

Once we got that fixed, we figured out we had leakage coming through the wall...and at the same time our water softener started leaking. So, essentially, our basement was all soaked, all the carpet had to get ripped up, and most of the drywall had to get the bottom 16 inches cut off of it.

Yep...my parents were very lucky it happened when I was home so I could move all the stuff into the garage while they were at work...and this all happened over Christmas...what a week.

Peter - I thought about one of those water powered backup sump pumps. My brother has one in his house, but on very hard rains he says it doesn't keep up (his has to pump up 8 ft high). I bought one of those battery backup pumps that is actually supposed to be the primary pump also. But I will use it only as a backup. This particular model requires two 12V batteries for power so I hope if the power goes out it would run for quite a while. Maybe I should have a water powered pump as backup for the battery pump? Or would that be overkill?

Just saw this on the Toolmonger blog... $220 battery operated sump pump/water alarm.

Bren R.

I think most people have covered off the basics here.

Sump pump, make sure it works and empties away from the house.

Sump pump alarm (or high water alarm) to let you know when that sump hole is filling too fast.

Suck the water out of the carpet with professional help, powerful vacuums.

Use a dehumidifier on high, or several, to get the humidity out of hte air and hence from the carpet back into the air. Dry out that basement completely!

Lastly, if the Axioms took a hit, below a certain line, we've had no problems (speaking from personal experience as with Bren, we live on a flood plain!).